The final countdown....

And so we're in it - the final week to 10 days of stockpiling and processing food, strengthening and testing muscles (not to talk of internal physiological changes which we know little about). But enough about the Brent research team, the geese themselves will be going through this.
We know that female body weight will continue to increase over the coming week, right up to departure; male index profiles (an index of body 'condition') on the other hand, plateaus off this week. Such information based on repeated scoring (visual) of 'belly profiles' of marked individuals throughout the spring staging period, an index calibrated against biometrics of birds at times of capture. It is always amusing to observe the 'fat-bottomed girls' getting progressively fatter as the month progresses. Photos of v fat geese will be posted in due course.

Not a brent goose....

Eiders are everywhere around Reykjavik! In some places they even join the mallards coming from bread....

Their breeding season is already well under way unlike the brent geese which aren't even half way through their migration. This female was sitting on a nest containing a couple of eggs on Seltjarnarnes Golf Course. Eiders are "farmed" in many places in Iceland to in order to protect nests and collect eiderdown to use in duvets and other soft things!

Stormy skies!

The weather has been all over the place in the last couple of days with a good mix of strong winds, hail, drizzle and sunshine.... All this means geese are often to be found sitting down (about their only way of hiding from the elements) which makes reading colour rings quite difficult!!

Stormy skies over the president's house

More from Alftanes...

Sunrise at some time around 4.30am this morning!
All these early starts mean we're going well with resighting lots of geese - I think its getting close to 3000 resightings of several hundred different brent geese. The idea behind doing this is to provide a really detailed picture of what sites individual geese are using and which other geese they are associating with when they do this

Us at work later this morning - you can just about see the geese on the far side of the field

We're also busy doing behavioural watches to learn more about what causes differences in how vigilant and aggressive different geese are. Particularly during the spring when there is more at stake brent goose battles can be pretty intense. This can include charging from one side of a flock to another to target another bird, body slams or even lunging in two-footed in a way Roy Keane would be proud of!

Off to explore Snaefellsnes tomorrow about threee hours drive north of Reykjavik - looking forward to a brief change of scenery!

Iceland 2013!

A lot has happened since the last time this was updated!

I had a very busy time out in Dublin in February and March, the highlight of which was the full team coming together at the start of March and managing to catch and ring 130 new birds in north Dublin. These birds all have either blue-blue or red-red combinations so if you see any geese with these ring combinations you can know they've been ringed in Dublin in the last couple of winters.

Also see this great blog post from the Trinity College EvoEcol blog that sums up this week quite nicely.

Now its time for spring brent chasing in Iceland. I've been up here for nearly 10 days now, joined by colleagues from the University of Exeter and the full Irish contingent are arriving in a few days time. Just like last year its been long, long days and some crazy weather but its a great place to be. Its been great to see a number of birds we ringed this year in Dublin have made the same journey too and have joined all the now familiar ringed birds out in the fields of Alftanes.

















More to come soon hopefully....

All things brent goose!

Last week a good few members of the group made a trip down to Arcachon (see the map if you don’t know where that is) to the 15^th meeting of the goose specialist group. The good showing being encouraged by the fact that the meeting was primarily for those researching brent, and in part I imagine due to the promise of lots of tasty food and drink! The three days of talks included presentations about all of the world’s brent populations, including researchers coming from Russia, Canada, the USA and even Mexico! This meant there was lots to be learnt and lots of people equally keen on their Branta to meet.

The East Canadian High Arctic population was very well represented. Kerry Mackie was first up talking about the importance of Strangford Lough as a staging site for this species, including some excellent historical detective work to follow the population size back through the twentieth century. Matt spoke about social networks, and most people seemed to understand, which is an improvement on normal. Graham caused the largest stir of the whole conference showing everyone just how friendly the brent geese can be in Dublin. He had the unfortunate task of trying to keep people awake in a post-3 course lunch session so this was quite an achievement! He went on to show data on ringing and resighting in the full ten year study. Last but not least Gudmundur talked about the importance if Iceland as a staging site in this flyway, before linking this into what we know about brent goose breeding ecology from the Arctic expeditions completed. The slide with a stuffed brent goose posing next to a particularly delicious looking slab of steak probably has to down as a highlight!

Meanwhile, posters made by Rich and Xav (thanks guys!) attracted plenty of attention and it was good to see a poster of Phillipe’s, which contained lots of information about Regneville – the ECHA brent’s main wintering site in France.

The conference was great, with the amount of awesome food available every lunch and dinner a remarkable feat! Being able to spend the second last day exploring the Bassin D’Arcachon both on foot (at Le Teich Nature Reserve) and by boat was also pretty cool. Inevitably geese were seen, both Greylags and Brent (although the organisers were fairly horrified as the 60,000 brent present in December had been reduced to only a few thousand!!) were scattered widely. However, for me at least, the real highlights were some of the species seen. Cracking views of a grey phalarope, numerous great white egrets and spoonbills, a first winter night heron, big flocks of avocets, aerial tussles between a peregrine and marsh harrier and some close-up views of black-necked grebes and great northern divers from the boat all spring to mind.

All in all a great trip! Hopefully I'm  going to get better at this whole blogging thing again now - although work might have something to say in that. Breaking laptops on fieldwork then being outrageously busy in the build up to Christmas left little time but does mean now I have lots of new things to share!

DUBLIN!!!!

The time finally arrived on Thursday to jet off for my first fieldwork of the 2012/13 brent season! I'll keep it brief as I have so far failed at bothering to charge up the camera so there are no pretty pictures to accompany this post...

Today - this morning at least - was an absolutely glorious winter's day, particular down on the coast with all the sights and sounds of Bull Island as the backdrop to my goose chasing. Just what was needed after an early start in the pouring rain on Friday and a slightly hungover (and somewhat lateish) start on Saturday. Its been a whirlwind so far - 348 resightings of 201 different colour-ringed Brent isn't a bad start! I've had less of a chance to focus on any behavioural studies as many of the geese are still feeding inter-tidally, with many roosting on the water when the tide is high (I reckon I counted ca. 1500ish from the Causeway at highish tide today for example). Still many of the parks already seem to be being used by geese in small numbers, particularly those that are close to the coast (there were about 750 in Kilbarrack this morning at high tide) or that draw birds in from Baldoyle Bay (there have been flocks fairly regularly in Portmarnock and at Red Arches - the site of our really big Dublin catches several years ago). As this trend continues (fingers crossed) my work will shift more and more towards focussing on behavioural watches on individuals.

I've been amazed how faithful particular geese are to areas of mud at low tide, with small flocks within certain areas almost always containing the same core individuals - it will be interesting to see how this effects the social networks produced from this field season. Also of note is a continued strong association between V U red yellow and V C red yellow with one of their blue blue juveniles from last year. A sibling of this bird has been seen in that same flock on a couple of occasions too. This persistence of associations between kin is something that might be important in determining social interactions more generally, something we hope to investigate in the next few years.

Now I'm back out in the field updates here should be more regular, work permitting. More tales from Dublin on the way soon!